


You, Hallowed Sun

by horsecrazy



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-16
Updated: 2015-11-16
Packaged: 2018-05-02 00:01:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5226173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/horsecrazy/pseuds/horsecrazy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'There is a girl in the Neva.' The last Original vampire, and her pretty Russian mermaid. Here, here, comrades, is Sister Death. Rebekah/Caroline femslash</p>
            </blockquote>





	You, Hallowed Sun

**Author's Note:**

> So Saturday night I was going to sit down and work on my Originals series, but I was just in the mood to tackle something a little lighter, so I thought, meh, I'll just open a new document and see what happens...and what happens, apparently, is over 8,000 words of murderous lesbian porn?
> 
> This incorporates several elements of Russian mythology, mainly that of the Rusalka. I decided not to specify an exact timeline, but there are allusions to historical events which set the story during WWI. I've drawn on some basic knowledge of the time period and Russian history in general, but this is, ultimately, a smut fic I was up writing till like 1:00 in the morning with no clue when I started what the hell it was even really going to be about, so this is going to be less history lesson than my usual historical pieces, more heaving boobies and wet this and that. Also, this is what happens when I'm up writing till 1:00 in the morning. Wtf, brain.
> 
> Petrograd, btw, is St. Petersburg. Even though no exact timeline is specified, it clearly takes place during WWI; the city's name was changed in 1914, so that's why I use Petrograd rather than the more recognizable St. Petersburg.
> 
> Warnings for graphic lady on lady. And murder. But that's what you're here for, you deviants.
> 
> The title I snagged from a line in Pushkin's poem 'The Bacchic Song', translated by Yevgeny Bonver.

There is a girl in the Neva.

Oh, you'll say she is addled.

It is not an unfair accusation: youth is the apotheosis of passion, of rashness, of madness, and hers has lived for approximately 921 years in her unstained cheeks.

But there is a girl, all the same.

When the Neva has sweated its thin December mist, and the waters are bruised with the gaslights' deaths, you can see first the light and shining head, and then the slick white breasts, artfully highlighted.

She is dead, of course.

But one should never hold that against a girl.

History has so often buried them in that sly white tomb of man's textbooks you must forgive the few who shout their demises, who wrest their mortality into a man's spotlight, where he is most uncomfortable with it.

She likes to watch the girl from behind the railing that wears Petrograd's December like cake frosting.

She likes to think the girl smells her own death, she likes to think the flakes which irritate rather than incapacitate land with similar casualness on the girl's shoulders, she likes to think, the river is not so very cold after all, the shoulders tremble with that scent of man which catches like a spice at the nostrils, and wakes the veins with Zeus-like din-

She likes to think: Here, here, comrades, is Sister Death.

She smiles when the girl ventures a bit closer one day, and she can see, the eyes are blue, the lips are soft, she has such nice hips, which below the water coquette the watcher's eye, and are by turns apple-round, child heavy, boyishly slight, girlishly promising.

When she was herself just a girl, she murdered her whole family, you know.

They thought: she's only a girl, she's soft, she'll bend to our new lash, she'll be a lovely toy, she's got the fine doll's cheeks, and the hands like a maiden's.

To be fair: Nik started it.

There was a snow just like this; she remembers how it settled on his eyes, and he couldn't blink it away.

* * *

When she is mid jeté en arrière, and the tutu merely a mist around her, when she feels the audience lean all the weight of their eyes and their expectations upon her, the stage lights steam the makeup from her cheeks, the colossal presence of the theatre which hangs pregnant with its own importance over the young heads of all the mortals who did not witness its arduous birth and will never last to its inevitable death-

She thinks about the girl.

She thinks: winter has fetched up against all the buildings, and made of the streets a mild revolution, where a man might be stoned with the very storm he wished from the stars (that ought to keep out the Germans, after all: oh silly beasts, silly beasts, you'd never guess what a soldier will do, when the blood is young in him, and immortality still fresh in his cheeks).

She thinks: does the Neva touch the breasts with cold and insensible fingers, does the girl sadly stroke the one curl with the tip that rests so lightly on the point of the nipple and wonder what it feels like, to be flush with the warm and living blood-

One of her suitors is waiting with a troika and a lap blanket when she has sponged the makeup from her cheeks, and left the eyes darkened like soot.

She likes the look of it.

A woman could do anything, anointed like this.

She is handed up into the troika.

Do you know-

She doesn't remember his name.

Well, don't judge her- she has so many of them sniffing round her.

Call him Ivan.

There is always an Ivan.

Of course, he is supposed to be the hero, he is supposed to get the girl, he is supposed to ride whole and hale to his next adventure, decked out like a prince, or filthy as a peasant, but she thinks being tarted up like a feast pig will work just as nicely for him.

* * *

She takes him to the Neva.

The wind makes a try for her shawl, and triumphs over his hat.

It's no night for a walk, he cries, he wants to go home, he wants to put the samovar on, and warm his hands at the fire, he wants he wants he wants- pity they're always so demanding, humans, they do smell so lovely.

The girl rises silently from the waters.

You can hear: the wind, the creaking of the windows, the crunch of ice displaced by so many boots, wheels, hoofs, that Siberian desolation which succeeds any good blizzard, and muffles all the former, so you are not sure: was there ever sound, did you dream its drum upon your ear, and all the cymbals of an everyday world-

You can't hear the girl breathing.

You can see her shoulders rising.

You can see the pink nipples, and the curls framing them like a masterwork.

The girl smiles.

The sun would need a chisel to supplant a Russian cloud cover, but it comes out on her face anyway.

You can imagine what she must have looked like alive, underneath a pretty muslin, pink or yellow, she'd wear something bright, something uplifting, she'd want you to look upon her, and walk away happy.

She lifts another inch above the water, so you see now the first hint of a lovely hip.

"It's so cold here," she calls to the man.

She feels him stiffen beside her, and stop rubbing the red out of his hands.

"I'm so lonely," she says, plaintively, you can hear her voice shake with it, and the lasting note of all the years upon years of theatrical sorrow she must have patiently honed beneath her Stygian waters.

She lays her gloved hands delicately on the railing with its double layer of cake frosting.

"Please," the girl calls. "Please, will you come and hold me? Just for a moment?"

You don't really have to bait the web. Of course: the pert breasts help, the trembling lips assist, the doe eyes provide the finishing blow.

But she could have dipped her shoulders below the water, and whispered his curiosity gently to her hand.

He climbs the railing.

The wind tears at his scarf.

The clouds have opened once more, and aged his hair in a moment.

The girl isn't looking at him.

It's not really his story.

Oh, he'll think it is: it's always Ivan's story, the princess is merely an afterthought, the fair peasant girl but a page, if his masculinity is to be fully realized, it must always be whetted with a girl's tender helplessness.

She folds her hands beneath her chin as he climbs over the railing, and for a moment hovers uncertainly.

"Please," the girl says again. "Please, I'm so lonely- it's been so long. Won't you kiss me? Just for a moment? I'm so cold."

He leaps.

The Neva for a moment froths at his sudden violation.

She wonders what he feels when he slides a hand gently along the girl's hip. She must be so soft- but is the skin clammy, puffed with her long internment- do her nipples prick him like ice, are the hands just as cold, when she touches them to the nape of his neck, is the tongue warm, or is he mystified with Nibelheim's arctic fog, and can no longer distinguish girl from river-

The girl looks at her first.

Then she kisses him.

The mouth opens with smooth practice; she presses him to her breasts.

She must, for a moment, feel the coat billow oven-like against her, and the furnace of his frightened heart.

They're always blazing, humans, when you press them to your breast, and for a moment revel in the feverish veins, and the jungle-like hands.

The girl sinks without a ripple into the water.

Interesting.

He didn't even cry out.

* * *

Tsar Nicholas II prefers Gogol, but tonight is reading Tolstoy's 'The Death of Ivan Ilych' while his wife and daughters quietly stitch, and from time to time offer their commentary.

Alexandra is wearing purple tonight; it makes a soft chuckle round her feet when she moves.

Anastasia has pricked her finger.

She quietly licks her lips, and smiles to herself.

"And Caius certainly was mortal, and it was right for him to die; but for me, little Vanya, Ivan Ilych, with all my feelings and ideas- for me it's a different matter. And it cannot be that I ought to die. That would be too awful. That was his feeling."

She wonders how Ivan oh-what's-his-name-anyway felt, standing with his toes teetering over the ledge, looking straight into the girl's open arms.

* * *

She brings a red-cheeked soldier in his crisp new uniform to the Neva three days later.

The girl waits a moment: for dramatic appeal, she supposes.

She can appreciate that.

They smile at one another.

She feels something warm inside her, and wonders if it's friendship.

"Please," the girl says, and there is a shiver down her back.

The boy steps into the water even easier than the first, the girl bats her eyelashes, she smiles so widely, so sunnily, you can see how a man doesn't stand a chance, never mind the pert breasts, the rosy nipples, the soft hips.

She wonders what it must feel like, the water closing over your head, the first panicked breaths, the breasts still flush against you, the practiced tongue, the fingers insistent at your neck. Perhaps she tells you: do not be afraid.

She likes that one.

They always look so relieved, for a moment.

* * *

"I always think just one, just once, is going to say no," the girl says to her after drowning her fifth victim. "But they're just  _so_ dumb."

"You have no idea," she replies, and for a moment they smile at one another, one murderess to another.

* * *

"What's your name?" the girl asks after the seventh.

She has to think for a moment.

Sometimes her name has no impact on them, and she's disappointed, she has to go through her rather well-worn what-do-you-mean-you-don't-know-who-I-am spiel, and she doesn't like that, it's positively Nik of her, he threw such a hissy fit, when a village did not cower before him, nor kings drop to their awestruck knees, and she's better than that, she doesn't need a name, she has her smile, she has her curls, she has her flawless maiden's hands which just last week strangled a fellow dancer, and laid him tenderly to rest.

She tilts her head.

The girl tilts her head back.

She's a little irreverent, a little challenging, she must sense  _something_ , she must feel a prickling of the neck, and a nervous flutter of the pulse, but she merely bobs in her river, sometimes rearranging the curls which have got disordered by the water, sometimes simply looking back with her large blue eyes.

"Rebekah. Rebekah Mikaelson."

"You're the first, aren't you?" the girl asks, and she's not frightened, she's not particularly awed, she has always been untouchable beyond that railing, you cannot, she supposes, daunt a girl who has already met and conquered her mortality.

She would know.

She drapes her hands over the railing.

The sun is shining today, like a second, brighter layer beneath funeral muslin, but she can feel its warmth, and see it picking out all the highlights in the girl's hair.

"The only," she corrects. "Who matters, anyway. What's yours?"

"Caroline," the girl replies, and she has advanced a full foot today, so her features are not merely suggested anymore, and she hasn't the need for anything other than a human's basic gaze to see the exact sweep of the nose, and the clearness of the forehead where the hair is neatly parted.

Caroline lifts her breasts above the waterline; she wonders if she can feel the sun upon them.

She leans a little farther over the railing.

For a moment, Caroline hesitates; you can see the struggle on her face, and then the sudden decision. "Where do you go, when you're not here? I see you coming from the palace, sometimes. Is that where you live?"

"Yes."

"You know the Tsar?"

"Yes. I stay with the royal family whenever I feel like it. Humans do what I tell them to."

Caroline wrinkles her brow, and oddly, she feels something knot inside her, she feels what's on the girl's face, she feels what it must be to live a thousand imagined balls and love a thousand imaginary men, and dream far Caribbean islands while the Neva laughs against the railing.

"Can you tell me…what it's like? Just what it looks like inside?" She has swum another foot closer.

The Negroes are her favorite, so she speaks of them first, the red trousers, the golden trim which brightens their jackets, the curved shoes, snowy turbans, the ceremony with which they open or close the doors to admit Tsar Nicholas or his wife.

Alexandra has a mauve boudoir.

If you can no longer remember lavender, she'll bring a swatch of it tomorrow, and from there the imagination can paint a whole glorious room as it might carpet a field, the curtains, the rugs, the pillows, not so much as a simple footstool has escaped the Tsarina's obsessive touch.

"Can you do that?" Caroline asks, and ducks almost shyly, till the water laps at her lower lip.

* * *

So she does.

She leans over the railing once more, and holds out the scrap of silk she has scavenged from the Tsarina's sewing basket.

Caroline hesitates.

"It's all right. You can't kill me."

The cheeks brighten suddenly, and the smile is not so stretched, it does not reveal so many teeth, but it seems genuine, she doesn't mean it as a seduction, she has not cast it out over the waters, and prepared to reel back what it's hooked.

She hovers for a moment longer, the water at shoulder level, and then the breasts lift once more, the water streams over her nipples, and trickles down her soft stomach, she rises a little more, and lifts her hand.

Their fingers do not touch, when she hands over the scrap.

She's never seen a girl cradle such a fragment before.

"I did forget," she says softly, looking down at it, the breeze stirring the damp curls on her shoulders. "I did forget what it looked like."

Their eyes meet.

"Thank you," Caroline whispers, and disappears suddenly beneath the Neva.

* * *

"How did you get in there anyway?" she asks one night. "Don't tell me you killed yourself over some stupid boy." She checks her nails. Pity; she's broken the left pinkie. She must have snapped it off hunting last night's supper.

"No. I had this real jerk of a boyfriend. He drowned me." Caroline is only a scant two feet from the railing tonight, and she can see on her cheeks and in her lashes what leftover river has not yet dried. "I don't remember much about it. I remember him holding my head under -I don't even remember where he drowned me- and I kind of remember trying to kick him, and getting in one good scratch on his cheek…and then nothing. I woke up in the water. And I've been here ever since. I don't know how long ago that was."

"Can you leave the Neva?"

"I can swim to any connecting bodies of water. But, I mean, after a while it kind of gets old. You can change up the scenery a little, but eventually you get to the ocean, and there's not really much to do out there. I mean, drowning people is kind of my only entertainment."

"Can't you lure men off ships or something?"

Caroline has taken out her scrap of purple fabric, and draped it over her arm, admiring how it stands out against her pale skin. "Yeah, but you have to time it right. I mean, obviously, there's got to be a ship that's just happened to show up right where you are at that moment. Then there has to be someone on deck. I'm not a siren; I can't pitch my voice like they can. So if there's a storm, the sailors can't hear me over it. It's just easier to grab people while they're walking along the river."

"Do you ever drown women?"

"Not really. I mean, if they were stupid enough to walk in here, sure, but I target guys because one, they like a damsel in distress, and two, oh my  _God_ they follow their penises like divining rods. I mean, hello? Creepy lady who can somehow survive butt freaking naked in  _this_ water, and you think she doesn't have, like, some kind of nefarious purpose as she's beckoning you forth with her conveniently amazing boobs?" She scoffs.

"They are rather thick." She eyes the clouds. "It looks like it's going to snow again. Nicholas is home, so there's going to be a ball tonight."

"Where'd he go?"

She waves her hand dismissively. "There's some little war going on right now. He pops out from time to time. Then I have to listen to his silly cow of a wife whine about how much she misses him. She writes pages upon pages to him every day. It's so annoying. They've been married more than twenty years, and she still acts like some stupid little bride."

Caroline bobs a full foot forward, almost close enough to touch the railing now. "Why haven't you killed her?"

She smiles. She does so love a woman who understands her. "I'm trying to seduce her. I'm bored; the palace could use the scandal."

"And she's not budging?"

She sighs. "No. It's ridiculous. No one turns  _me_ down. I could just compel her of course, but that would be giving up."

Caroline folds her arms on the little strip of cement which pokes out beyond the railing, nearly touching her toes.

She shifts her feet just a little, and looks down: this close, she can see the cleft of the girl's cleavage, which her arms frame automatically, and emphasize with professional expertise.

The Neva shines softly on them.

She can see, if she leans out just a bit farther, the soft curve of where the smooth back seamlessly flows into the nicely rounded ass.

Caroline tosses her hair, and lifts those long lashes from her cheek, so the eyes are even more innocent than usual, and the mouth softens with the instinct of nearby prey.

She doesn't mean it, she can tell.

Well: she doesn't mean to coax her over the side, and into the death she has for years tempted feeble humans to willingly embrace.

But she does, perhaps, mean for the breasts to rise with each soft breath she doesn't need, for the curls to lie alluringly on the soft shoulders, for the eyes to waken her breast, her belly, the subtle tensing of her thighs.

She smiles.

What a companion she'd make for tonight's soiree, in crisp pink silk, or sunny yellow muslin, the chandeliers animating her hair which for so long has made do with a few sullen wheat-like ropes down her back.

"I'll bring you back something lovely from tonight's party," she promises.

* * *

Caroline has forgotten what red looks like.

Oh, she knows the basics of it well enough, but she's forgotten the subtleties of it, the softer crimsons which edge into pink, the far sunset side of the spectrum, which blazes as these waters can only recreate in pastel imitation.

She brings three pairs of gloves and her dance partner.

She had them specially ordered from Paris; she knows a tailor personally.

The best, of course.

She watches Caroline kiss and then drown the man, and afterward leans over the railing with her offering.

"Oh my God- these are beautiful!"

She takes them carefully, so the fingertips do not brush, but she stays for an extra moment above the water, smiling so brightly.

* * *

"I wish I could see you dance."

"I'm wonderful."

Caroline makes a noise in the back of her throat, and rolls her eyes. "And so modest."

"I don't have any use for false modesty. I'm the best the stage has ever seen. I ought to be; I've been dancing off and on since 1835."

Caroline cups her chin in her hands. "Really? What's it like, performing in front of that many people? I mean, I know you could eat them without even blinking, but do you ever feel nervous?" She bites her bottom lip. "Sometimes I do. Before I kill someone. I mean, not like, really legitimately nervous…just…anticipatory, I guess? Do you feel like that?"

She thinks of the little quiver in her belly, and that lightning of adrenaline, all the way down to her toes.

"Yes."

"So. Had sex with Alexandra yet?"

She purses her lips.

"I'm gonna' go with 'no', then. I'm sure she'll probably give in eventually. I would."

"Don't patronize me."

"I'm not. I believe in you."

"How heartening." She tilts her head. "I wonder if I ought to seduce her husband first. Humans do like their petty little revenges."

"At least you can hop in  _somebody's_ bed. Imagine being stuck in eternal foreplay, because you're compelled to drown every single one of your lovers before they can even get to any tongue stuff."

* * *

She is walking along the Neva one night with the moon over her shoulder, and Caroline swimming companionably alongside her.

The air is threatening snow, and the humans are safely buttoned away in their mortal shelters, the theaters closed till morning, the palace deep in its slumbers, all Petrograd snug beneath its latest storm.

She can see ice in the Neva.

The snow has swallowed her to the shin.

She has wondered so many times: what does Caroline feel, are the nerves burnt with death, and oblivious to storm or sun, does she feel even a hint of summer bliss or winter privation- do the lover's fingers for a moment break the ice, and touch just woman and not creature-

She turns to the railing, and leans once more against it, with her hand creasing her cheek. "What's it like in there?"

"What do you mean?"

"Are you cold? Is it uncomfortable? Painful? Can you feel anything at all?"

The moon glints off each little peak Caroline disturbs as she treads water. "It's…tepid, I guess you could say. I mean, I can feel the water against my skin. Probably not like I used to. Probably not like I should. Sometimes…I think I feel the sun on me. But I think it's more like…" She wrinkles her brow. "A memory of the sun, you know? Like how I think it's  _supposed_ to feel."

"Do you feel it when the men touch you?"

"Yes. I mean, just for a couple of seconds. But, yes. For a moment. I can feel how warm they are. I can guess what I probably used to feel like."

She remembers that, distantly, in the misty way which you recall your childhood, not its details, but some of its impressions, which years later still somewhere haunt the subconscious.

"That's what it feels like for me. Everything's muted. I can feel the snow, but it doesn't burn me. I could dive into the river right now, and my skin would flinch, I'd probably shiver, but I wouldn't feel it like a human does, not to the very bones of me."

She does miss that, sometimes.

To just…ache to the very foundation of you with something.

"You feel warm to me," Caroline says. "That's what draws me toward them, the humans, I mean. Because I can sense what they'd feel like against me. Because I know, for a minute, I'd feel warm, I'd feel…something besides the river. You're not quite like a human, you're not that…tempting, I guess you could say? But you feel warm. To me."

She flutters her hand airily beside her face, and turns her nose up haughtily. "Not as tempting as a human- I take a murderous amount of offense to that."

Caroline laughs. She likes the girl's laugh. It's light, it's not a snare, it makes her want to smile.

"Well, I guess you'll have to take it out on some poor bystander."

"I could come in after you. You might be immortal, but you've never matched yourself against anything like me." She smiles, a little threateningly, and feels the air change suddenly between them.

Caroline for a moment hovers silently treading water, the moon gleaming on her shoulders, and then she strokes forward till her fingertips light gently on the stone barrier which stretches down from the railing, and holds herself with her belly pressed nearly flush against it, her breasts just above the waterline.

She lifts her cheek from her hand.

They are both breathing hard with the sudden awareness between them.

She feels her belly tighten.

"You could," Caroline says quietly. "You could come in after me."

She watches the breasts rise softly, and wonders what they would feel like beneath her hands, the kinds of noises Caroline would make against her, would she come instantly against the fingers, arch her neck with it, tighten her thighs around the pumping hand-

Somewhere down the street, a drinking house has emptied, or a party just spilled its revelers into the snow; they crow noisily with their celebration.

Caroline slips underneath the water.

* * *

Oh, beloved Nicky, most exalted husband, how she longs for his nightly kiss, and his shape upon the pillow, yawn, yawn.  _Yawn_.

She might have to eat the woman after all.

She strolls down to the Neva when she tires of the woman's incessant whining (surely Russia can secure for itself a better ruler than this twit), but it's a mild afternoon, and the streets are thick with students and peasants peddling their wares, so Caroline is nowhere to be found.

She does peer out over the river, though, and imagine where she dwells, what little grotto she has built and brightened for herself out of the colors she is slowly, night by night assimilating into her monochrome comprehension.

* * *

"What does the music sound like, in the theater? Sometimes I can hear them, depending on where I am in the river- operas, I think you call them. But I can't make them out very well."

You can't describe music, she tells the girl. She has no scraps she can proffer, so that she might in bits and pieces and stops and starts begin once more to understand, oh yes, once I knew this, and I loved it so.

Caroline is silent for a very long time, after this revelation. "Why can't you describe it?"

"Because you can't capture it, not like a color. It's fleeting. A note can only be hit in exactly a certain way with exactly a certain sentiment once. You can never recreate that. A singer will always perform slightly differently each time. At least to someone with my hearing. And I'm a bloody awful singer, so no, don't ask."

Caroline is quiet for another long moment, collecting in her lashes the little flakes of snow which fall sporadically, and looking out over the river with such a pensive furrow to her lovely brow.

She is sitting on the railing today.

She can feel how she tips occasionally, with a little encouragement from the wind, her balance automatically correcting, and nudging her back toward the lights of the city.

The water is gray, unsettled, a bit angry with the weather, the wind lashes a good blush into Caroline's cheeks, the snow blanches the river-heavy hair, so it must be nearly its original color.

She thinks: the water isn't far.

She thinks: Caroline is just lovely tonight, the snow-bleached hair, the eyebrows gathering their own white fur, you could see her rising from the pages of a storybook, the wizened maiden with her beautiful breasts, her cream cheeks, her hoarfrost hair.

She could slip into the water so quietly, with hardly a ripple, she'd never flail as so many of the men do, she'd just slide so smoothly in, and touch first the silky hip, and then the damp hair, she'd press her own breasts to Caroline's, so she could feel for as long as she wanted the stiff nipples, and the freshly-scented cleavage.

She wonders: how long has it been since she's had the breasts properly fondled, and the nipples kissed.

"Caroline," she says, so the girl will look at her before she decides.

She has sunk herself to the chin today, and every so often takes a little slap to the mouth, which she swallows unthinkingly.

She doesn't need to ask why her name has been said.

For a long moment, they look at one another.

She knows when she is being undressed with sly eyes, and all her contours drawn up in the imagination, she can tell, Caroline wants to know, how much does the dress bind down, how plump are the thighs, does the neck skin feel as soft as it looks, and the hair float which such silken ease over a lover as it touches down upon the shoulders?

She slips down off the railing, lightly, and lands soundlessly on the little square of cement.

Caroline swallows hard.

The dress ties are difficult to get at with just her own fingers, but she unknots them after a moment of struggle, and lifts it over her head, so she is in just her thin underclothes, and can fold the silk carefully over the railing.

"Wait- I'll pull you under," Caroline says. "I want to. I'm sorry-"

"You won't," she interrupts, and eases herself down onto the cold cement, so she can just slip over the side, and hardly raise a foam.

"Are you sure?"

"Caroline, I'm the strongest creature in this world. I'm not going to be undone by some little blonde mermaid. And even if you could pull me under, you can't drown me."

Caroline takes a deep breath. "Ok. Ok, then."

She is still submerged to her chin, and looks up with wide eyes.

Caroline must feel the slight wash against her naked body, when she drops almost noiselessly into the water- surely she feels any minuscule change in her river, but the chin has not moved, the arms stroke somewhere beneath the surface, her hair spreads kelp-like round her cheeks.

She feels first the cold hand on her hip.

The fingers are not wrinkled, but smooth, soft, the nails are neatly trimmed, the palm is small, nearly vulnerable, you could marvel over its delicacy, surely, surely, it's not touched a hair on a single man's head.

Her nipples are hard against her shift.

She wonders, did Caroline ever get to feel that beneath their voluminous coats, did she ever for a second get to skim her fingers over them, and marvel at how a body can pucker at merely a touch, did she feel the cock stiffen, and remember with a pang what it is to be warmly satisfied between slick sheets-

She does try to pull her under.

It's such a small tug: she wonders that any man was ever defeated by it.

For a moment, there is a panicked tension in the girl's face, and then a brief confusion, the struggle of belief, and finally the smooth surety which irons her brow, and relaxes her lips.

She touches Caroline's waist first, where it flares out into the beautiful hips, gently, and then she runs her hands over the upper curve of the hips, around to the small of the back, feels the knots of the spine, the smooth roundness of the ass.

Their breasts touch.

Caroline shudders.

She lifts the girl's hair from her neck, and for a moment just trails her lips along it, not really kissing it, just testing the skin, feeling the youthful spring of it, and with her tongue tasting the hollow between collar bone and shoulder.

When she kisses the girl, she has to be very careful about it, sucking the bottom lip delicately, till the tension has gone out of her shoulders, and Caroline lifts her hands to gingerly cup her cheeks.

A woman is so soft; she always forgets that, till she has one. Men like to just flail away till they have finished, but a woman has such delicious bends and arches and curves to explore- you could linger for hours on just the chest, feeling with tongue, fingers, nipples the soft upper skin, the tender underside, the rough nipples, the tapering rise into the armpit.

Caroline is hungry; she kisses exactly like you'd expect; she wants to feel every part of you, to press herself against everything, to explore your warm mouth, the hard nipples, the shuddering thigh skin.

When she pulls her shift up over her hips, Caroline suddenly stops.

The Neva slops against her waist, and jars some of the haze from her eyes.

She can just reach one of the bars of the railing, and grasps it now.

"Wrap your legs around my waist," she tells the girl, pressing herself back against the wet stone.

"What? Why- oh my  _God_ ," Caroline breathes.

* * *

There is, according to local legend, a baba yaga just outside of Moscow.

She hasn't any time for the woman's tacky skulls or equally ugly chicken hut, and simply waltzes right in the door, while the skulls leer dumbstruck after her.

"I want a favor," she tells the woman imperiously.

The hag has the nerve to sneer at her. "Those are not given for free."

"Of course not. I just won't be the one paying," she says, and smiles brightly.

She leaves the woman's hut with an amulet on a bright silk ribbon, and the woman's blood on her lips.

She studies the ribbon happily. A nice raspberry pink; Caroline will like it immensely, and wear it so proudly.

* * *

"I have a surprise for you," she says next night, and loops the amulet round Caroline's neck.

She holds out her hand.

Thus must Hans Christian Anderson's fair mermaid have first looked upon her new world, when she felt the flagstones beneath her aching feet, and realized, oh, there's a surface, there's an other, there's an  _above_.

* * *

She can't take the girl home naked, of course, and has dressed her in a yellow silk that doesn't quite fit, but will do well enough, the amulet tucked safely into her neckline.

You'll have to wear it always, and keep your hair wet whenever you're away from the river, she tells the girl, but they are small fetters to wear.

She has claimed the best state rooms for herself, naturally, and when Caroline first sees them, the gold borders, the rich emeralds, the soft down of the comforter which can swallow a man as thoroughly as any river, she tears up.

And then she laughs, and how a man ever drowned her after hearing it, she couldn't tell you.

She lets Caroline undress her, loosening the stays so she can slide the breasts free of the neckline, and for a moment lick each nipple, lingering over the tips of them till she feels damp.

Caroline wants to kiss every part of her, languidly exploring from breast to hip bone.

The soft curls have dried at the tips, and tickle her stomach as Caroline moves down.

She can tell she's never had a woman before; she hesitates when she reaches the soft strip of hair between her legs, but then there's the searching finger, the exploratory brush of its tip over her clit which tenses her toes, and flutters her lashes, and then she's between the slick lips, and these too Caroline wants to discover with first her fingers and then her tongue, down either side of the clit, till her knees are shaking with the closeness of her orgasm.

She shows Caroline how they can lie so she can press first one finger and then the second between those slick lips, while she closes her lips round Caroline's clit, and sucks a gasp from her.

Caroline's so wet, and when she pushes her tongue inside, one slow inch at a time, so she can savor how she tastes, and lick it from her lips, she shivers with the first little shock of her orgasm, and starts to pump faster with her fingers.

She flips them so she is straddling Caroline.

What lovely breasts, so soft, so high, they glide so smoothly beneath her fingers, the nipples respond so nicely, and when she rolls her hips, slowly, so their clits just barely graze, Caroline groans, and grabs a fistful of the sheets.

She trails her hands down Caroline's sides, drags her nails over the tops of the thighs, and then the insides, rolls her hips again.

She leans forward, so she can feel the shivery drag of Caroline's nipples on her own, so their hip bones are flush, their clits slick with sweat, arousal, she thrusts again with her hips, catches Caroline's moan with her mouth, raises the hands above her head, and threads their fingers together.

"Do you want me to go faster?" she whispers, biting Caroline's ear, sinking her teeth into the lobe, following the ripe curve of her neck down to the shoulder, where she smells best.

"Yes," Caroline gasps, pressing up with her hips, the fingers tightening on her own, those soft and milky thighs spreading a little wider, so that when she strokes forward this time, there's so much friction, the room blackens a little at the edges, she feels the beginning tremor all the way in her toes.

She is about to roll her hips again when Caroline shoves her off, and slams her back on the bed.

She could stop the girl of course, with one hand, with one pinkie, she could pin the girl, and bring her just to the brink, and leave her sobbing out her desperation, the breasts heaving, the thighs trembling, the clit swollen against her tight and aching own-

But she wants to see where she'll go with this.

Caroline has seated herself a little lower, on the tops of her thighs, and rolls her thumb almost experimentally over the clit, presses with her middle finger at the opening, to test its slickness, finds that the finger slips smoothly, willingly, and pushes it inside, till she is knuckle deep.

She likes to pump slowly, curving the finger come hither like back toward her, so she hits that one particular spot just right, stimulating it gently, so the building is a gradual layering, her breath increasing just fractionally with each smooth thrust of the finger.

When she can feel that she's dampened her thighs with her arousal, and her knees are shaky with Caroline's ministrations, Caroline slips her finger out, and rubs her clit lightly at first, in large circles, that she can barely feel the friction of it against the bone beneath, and then concentrating more at the uppermost swell of it, pressing hard, so she can feel the bone abrade the nerves, and light them.

The finger slips back down inside her when the heat and tingling have built in her clit almost unbearably, and she has begun to pant, her head falling back against the pillows.

She can smell Caroline's arousal.

The soft river-wet thigh slips along her own.

"Do you bring them back here?" Caroline wants to know, sliding her finger out once more, and lifting it to her mouth.

You can tell she hasn't tasted anything in so long, just the snow, just the waves, just water, water, oh, it must have been so gray.

"Your victims? Do you bring them back here?" she asks, and returns to the clit, stroking it with the tip of her thumb, so softly, so softly.

She smiles, and slides her hands up the girl's thighs, until they rest lightly on her hips.

"Would you like to see?"

* * *

They follow a well-dressed man from his mistress' house to his troika.

Wait, wait, she urges Caroline, and listens to the snow, to the breathing of the girl beside her, to the dissent of his roused stomach beneath his thick overcoat.

He sounds famished.

She can relate.

When he has settled himself, she hands Caroline up into the troika, and pushes in rudely after.

"What do you think-"

"Drive just round the corner there," she tells him, leaning over Caroline to look him straight in the eyes when she says it, and there is hardly a delay of the eager hooves.

How nice it is to savor him, with an audience.

She straddles him while she drinks, and look what death does to the girl, look how the river has twisted her, watch her touch his cheeks, and remember oh yes, oh yes, he will cool soon enough, but feel how it burns in him, for a while yet.

They fuck on the seat beside him, Caroline winding in a long gasp, and letting it out as nearly a sob when she comes.

* * *

She takes Caroline to theaters, to music halls, to balls.

She feeds her cake, the good thick chocolate one which the French cook can produce with automated perfection, and licks its cream from her lips.

They bring men sometimes back to the stateroom or to the Neva, where Caroline sheds her gown, and stands perfect in the moonlight, saying over her shoulder, come, come, she's too warm, and the water is so calm.

* * *

She likes to watch the young soldiers glide their cocks in and out of Caroline, their asses tightening with each thrust, the fingers like claws in the sheets.

They hardly need any sleep at all, when they know soon it might not ever shake itself from their lids when the infant morning ray touches whatever it reaches first through the window.

She doesn't remember what that's like, to just marvel at a breath in your breast, and be recalled to that infinite human truth, that they will not always so easily fill your lungs.

* * *

Nik would have been a king, you know, if he'd lived.

When the mazurka is struck up, and stirs the dance floor, when the ballroom is blurred with that magician's confluence of electric lights, stiff vodka, wistful reminisce, she thinks, what would he have thought, watching the pale float of the raspberry gowns, and the yolk-like sashes, the airy ballooning of the white muslin, the impressionist confusion of shy suitor, bitter widow, virgin debutante.

She thinks: Alexandra is not so very competent a Tsarina after all.

She thinks: her brother would have been a king, if he'd lived.

But he didn't live.

* * *

She wets Caroline's hair faithfully each morning at the wash stand she keeps beside her toilet table, refreshes it at mid-day, gives it a final slick before bed.

She likes from time to time to take a dip in the Neva herself, and float with her breasts heavy on the water, smiling her victims away from the shore.

Caroline cannot puncture a man with her teeth, and sip away his life, but she does carry a little knife on her, and learn how to open his jugular with one thrust, to widen it with a second, to sit and bathe her hands in the warmth of it and realize all death is not the same, it's not all white, it doesn't smell of snow or water or river weed, it doesn't dissolve at a poke of the finger, and float free little spongy pieces of blue fingertips, gray lips, black toes.

* * *

She lets Caroline pull her under once, just to see.

It's somewhat underwhelming, darling.

That's what her brother Kol would have said.

It's somewhat underwhelming, darling: I give you a three for effort, and a five for enthusiasm.

Afterward, they kiss in the shallow end, and stroke their fingers softly between the wet thighs, and with matching smiles look up at the dandy who has stumbled down to the shore, pressing their nipples together, Caroline with a lap of her tongue sucking the bottom lip into her mouth, where she bites it just a little brutally.

Come in, come in, Caroline calls.

We're so cold, she adds, and your coat is so warm.

Wrap us in its folds?

He is knee-deep in the river when Caroline touches his cock. She strokes it through the thin trousers, and wraps her free hand round his neck; farther into the river she begins to pull him, but no Russian fable is any match for her.

She breaks Caroline's hold on the man easily.

Patience, patience: that's what Nik used to tell her.

You would have liked him. He had curls like an angel's, and the eyes of a killer.

She slips off the man's coat.

Caroline unbuttons his shirt.

When he is naked as them, they all huddle closely together, in a little intimate circle, and take turns kissing the man's neck, feeling the patch of hair on his chest, the wiry bush of it at his groin.

She even, for a moment, kneels in the silt, and takes the head of his cock in her mouth.

She likes to explore the ridge of it with her tongue, tasting the full underside of it, tracing the sensitive tip, feeling all the little shockwaves this produces in his legs and the hands which helplessly grasp her hair.

Caroline presses herself against him when she pulls away.

Come along, come along, she singsongs, and gently leads him two steps farther out.

When he is waist-deep, with his arms round Caroline's waist, and his cock thrusting between the smooth lips of her pussy, she bites his neck.

He goes so stiff, so suddenly.

Caroline locks his hips against her, and rolls her own with a gasp, stroking the head of him along her clit, and she pulls away from his neck, letting the warmth of him roll down her tongue, down her throat, into her belly, into her spine, where it quivers like static, she feels how fat he still is with blood, and shoves him into Caroline's arms.

Caroline pushes his head under.

She usually does it gently, there is usually the soft press of her breasts, the brush of her lips, perhaps a hint of the warm tongue, and then oh, there's no need to be frightened, you can't escape her arms, no, no, but it's not so bad down here, it's not so bad, you see, you'll never be alone-

She has a whole collection of you, row upon row of mottled white innocents which break off like soft cheese, so remember, remember, don't touch them.

She's sure you understand.

He thrashes; he cries out; the moon skips lightly along each knot of his spine.

Caroline kisses the blood off her lips, and suddenly they are moaning against one another, she can feel how tight her clit is, the shivery awareness of it, the hot pressure of her impending release, Caroline sucks her neck, and bites at her mouth, they lose themselves for a moment in one another's tongues, the man crying and thrashing between them, and then Caroline touches her clit, and oh God,  _God_ , she's so close-

She comes loudly when the man stops kicking.

* * *

Do you want to be a queen, she asks, setting the nuptial crown she has stolen from the treasury on Caroline's head, and admiring how that looks, all the naked white skin, and the diamonds scattering their own little spotlights over the silky breasts, the long thighs.

She is eating another piece of cake, and reading Pushkin.

She likes the way the vowels taste, she said when she opened her first virgin copy of  _Eugene Onegin_ , and bent to inhale the pages.

It's been so long since she had a book.

She touches Caroline's cheek with the back of her hand, trails it down the chin, over the neck, between the breasts, feels each slight variation in the skin, the tissue-like face, the firm apple-flesh of the throat.

Yes, Caroline gasps when she licks between her thighs.

She likes to hear that.

That's what her brother said, in almost exactly that voice, when she met the next arch of his back with that unhesitating thrust of her stake.

* * *

Nik would have liked the poetry of this night, all that snow, all those dresses in the pretty pastels of lost spring.

She likes it too.

She glides from man to man, and whispers to them of the Neva, and you can tell, for a moment they think, but it's so cold, there is still in this aristocratic warmth the memory of the streets outside, piled up like wedding cakes.

She did tell you: no one turns her down.

The women are instructed to wait patiently in the ball room, while the men stream obediently out into the night, single file, hatless and shivering. There is no fog tonight, but you wouldn't know it for their breath.

Caroline breaks the surface of the water, wearing the moon on her breasts.

It makes such a statue of her.

She watches them one by one clamber onto the railing, till you cannot tell, was there ever a railing, or has the city always guarded its errant automobiles with this human chain which stands shoulder to shoulder, panting in the cold?

"Come in, come in!" Caroline calls. "Please! I'm so cold."

The arms raise in unison.

Up, up, up, they go, one coordinated wave, till they all stand with their palms together overhead, poised like divers.

Some of them cut the water smoothly, like knives; others slap the surface awkwardly, and choke on the aftershock of their landing.

But they all leap, of course.

Caroline strokes the first softly, above and below the water, and kisses him like she has awaited this so long.

She leans her elbows on the railing, and smiles.

* * *

Before she kills the Tsarina, she kisses her.

Thoroughly, with tongue, so she can taste the blood of her daughters; perhaps that will teach her to whine.

Then she stabs her.

It's so intimate, the way the knife slides into her heart, the final gasp, the breasts straining the silk for their last breath, those delicious wet gurgles, when the voice is too saturated for her to quite make out: is that a plea, or a defiance?

She runs her tongue over the blade of the knife, and shoves Alexandra out of her soft red chair.

Caroline has walked naked through the streets, and stands now in the entryway to the ballroom, dripping the Neva into the open mouths and unstaring eyes of the bodies piled mountain-like at her feet.

She lowers herself onto that red, red velvet, and runs her hands over the arms of the chair.

"You see," she says. "I can have anything I want."

History never tells women that.

Caroline smiles.

The river stands like diamonds on her nipples, and for a moment trembles there.

The first drop which gives up shatters on the eye of the Romanov eldest, pretty Olga, her hair freshly rolled, the blue silk torn at the neck, and stained to the waist.

Nik: you would have been a king.

But she was tired of those sly white textbooks, and how everyone always gasped first at your name, and knelt to her in preoccupied afterthought.

Caroline steps forward.

She opens her arms.

 


End file.
